The folks at ScanCafe have just become new sponsors of the LensFlare35 podcasts! The company started, oddly enough, at a funeral.
Many years ago, one of the co-founders, Laurent, had to travel back to Switzerland to attend the funeral of his grandfather. Every family seems to have a family archivist, and among his many gifts, Laurent’s grandfather was an enthusiastic photographer, who left behind countless Agfacolor prints, slides and negatives.
As the engineer in the family, Laurent volunteered to scan in all those old photographs so that they could be shared with the extended family, who are scattered all over the world. Many of these photos, in fact, had been forgotten altogether, and Laurent thought it would be a great tribute to his grandfather to make sure the next generation had these memories easily available.
So at least it started well. Laurent promptly got home, spent $800 on equipment, and began his project. For the next six straight weekends, he had to wrestle with scanning, choosing resolutions, re-scanning, cropping, rotating, color correction, and all the other things that people who truly care about preserving memories need to wrestle with. And that was just for the first images — it turns out that he had 28,000 more to go!
Fortunately, Laurent was also attending business school at the time with our other co-founders, Sam Allen and Naren Dubey. He shared his frustrations with them and together they decided there had to be a better way. The essential problem: how to deliver the high quality that only craftsmanship and manual processing can bring to scanning, but at an affordable price. That required finding a labor force that fit those two bills. After looking at a number of locations around the world, they decided to locate their scanning facility, now the world’s largest, in Bangalore, India. Then, in a nod to their collective experience in computing and wafer fabrication, they started work immediately on getting the logistics, quality assurance, and workflow systems right, so that they could ensure quality and safety for every order.
A solid year of work and planning later, the first order was completed, safely and accurately, by hand.
So, if you get a chance, go by their website, check out the services they have to offer, and tell them ‘thanks’ for supporting LensFlare35!
